By most accounts, Leonard Patrick Gonzalez Jr.  the failed karate
instructor who allegedly murdered a wealthy Pensacola, Fla., couple last
month in front of their young adopted children  is a blowhard. "He's
always got a big game," one friend told police, "he's always got some
bullsh-t to talk about." Said another, "He's always blowing smoke up
everybody's tail about, you know, 'I got this going on, we're gonna make
some money,' da-da-da." As a result, "it would be easy to dismiss Gonzalez
as a lying con man, which he is for the most part," notes David Morgan,
sheriff of Escambia County in Florida's northwestern panhandle, who says he
has heard some tall tales from Gonzalez since he was arrested. "But sadly
there are instances in his life when his boasting had elements of
truth."

Like the $150,000 Gonzalez, 35, claimed he was paid last year by a
wealthy but bitter divorcee who lives near Pensacola. He said she hired him
as a gumshoe to trail her ex-husband around the country and dig up anything
illegal in his life that she could use to get him arrested. Gonzalez never
uncovered anything incriminating; but the story, says Morgan, actually
checks out. (See
the top 10 unsolved crimes.)

Which makes the sheriff more inclined to believe that Gonzalez  who
is charged with shooting Byrd "Bud" Billings and his wife Melanie in their
spacious home as he and six others allegedly robbed it the night of July 9
 was hired to commit the murder by resentful local business rivals. In
police documents released this week, Gonzalez says one used-car dealer,
Henry "Cab" Tice, told him that he and other dealers wanted the 66-year-old
Billings "whacked" and asked him to do the job. (Gonzalez claims he refused
 although he boasted to police, without offering details, that he's
taken part in other murders for hire.) Morgan tells TIME he expects to make
more arrests soon in a homicide case that's become shocking and sordid
enough to recall Truman Capote's In Cold Blood  and one that has
orphaned the Billings' 17 children, 13 of them adopted and most with
disabilities like Down Syndrome. "We'd all prefer it if this were a group of
losers visiting a random act of violence on this family," Morgan says, "but
with each passing day and each new witness, we're finding that's probably
not the case." (See the top
25 crimes of the century.)

Tice denies involvement in any conspiracy, insisting to a Pensacola
television station this week that he "never wanted any harm to come to Bud
or Melanie." Still, Morgan says Tice and "three or four other people" remain
"persons of interest" in the investigation. Tice, 63, a former business
partner of Billings, has acknowledged that he "hated Billings" and that they
had a rancorous falling out over thousands of dollars Tice owed Billings'
loan company, Worldco. (Tice, in fact, has been charged with grand theft
after Billings turned him in last year for allegedly writing Worldco $17,000
in bounced checks. Tice denies the charge and claims he had an agreement
with Billings to hold the checks until he could cover them.)

The new case documents do suggest the Billings murders were a "hit."
Billings, for example, was shot six times with a 9-mm handgun  once in
the back of each leg, twice in the face and twice in the back of the head,
the kind of deliberate execution-style pattern often meant to send a
message. One of the Billings' adopted special needs children, an autistic
boy who was in the couple's bedroom where they were killed, told
investigators via sign language that "bad men" burst in and told Billings,
who briefly struggled with them, "You're gonna die." Melanie, 44, was shot
twice in the chest and three times in the face.

Six other males  including Gonzalez's father, an Air Force sergeant
and a 16-year-old  have also been charged with capital murder as well as
home invasion and, like Gonzalez, have pleaded not guilty. (The teen has
been charged as an adult but will not face the death penalty.) An eighth
defendant, a woman charged as an accessory to the murder for allegedly
providing a van used in the crime, has also pleaded not guilty. But
investigators say Gonzalez's accomplices have fingered him as the sole
gunman  and add that while they'd been lured by his promise of millions
of dollars he believed Billings kept in a safe at the home, most of them
didn't know Gonzalez allegedly planned a murder. As it was, the group many of them captured on home security video in black ninja-style clothes
and masks  hauled away one of Billings' empty safes instead of the one
that contained money (about $164,000) and jewelry.

Morgan says "the one common thread" now expressed by Gonzalez's
co-defendants, as well as their friends and family members, is a fear of
being whacked themselves by figures who they believe contracted Gonzalez to
organize the break-in and shooting. Making the investigation more baroque is
the $20,000 that Tice, hoping to save his struggling car business, recently
borrowed from people he says turned out to be "Mexican mafia" and wanted
their money back more quickly, and at higher interest, than he could handle.
The shadow of organized crime retribution, real or imagined, is another
oft-mentioned anxiety in police interviews. Gonzalez even told investigators
that he's in "very deep" and fears for his and his family's safety because
of it.

Tice, a former employer of Gonzalez and one of his karate students,
telephoned Gonzalez the night of the murders (for computer help, he told
police) and again the next morning. Morgan admits that's not enough at the
moment to bring conspiracy charges against Tice or any of the other car
dealers who Gonzalez told police "just did not like Billings at all" and who
described the deceased as a loan shark. But the sheriff believes "the pieces
are coming together." Billings, like his competitors, many of whom owed him
money, inhabited a Florida panhandle business world that resembled a tawdry
cable TV drama series. "Bud Billings was a very hard-nosed, unyielding
businessman because he had to be," Morgan says. "He was in a high-risk
business, loaning money to the kind of people who can't get it anywhere
else."

Gonzalez was one person Billings didn't loan money to. Gonzalez's wife
Tabitha told police that Billings once donated $5,000 to their nonprofit
program to teach people self-defense, but he refused them a loan to save
their martial arts studio, which later went under. According to Tabitha, she
and Gonzalez have six children.

Still, Morgan says he doesn't buy into the idea "that Bud Billings
brought this on himself." He points to the fact that Bud and Melanie "opened
their home and fortunes" to their adopted brood as proof of their charitable
side. But even that admirable domestic picture has come under scrutiny in
the murder's wake: Billings, who was arrested in 1989 for adoption fraud,
tried earlier this decade to copyright his adopted children's names in a
bizarre scheme to extract money from Florida's Department of Children &
Family Services. He had also recently thrown two of his teen-aged children
out of the house because he didn't like the people they were dating.

Morgan insists that if his department ultimately "can't prove a
conspiracy, we'll drop it immediately. But as long as there are believable
threads there, I have to pursue them. You can't have that kind of collective
element operating in your community if it's true." Many Pensacola residents
 including journalist Rick Outzen, who first broke the murder-for-hire
story on his blog last month  now agree with him. Meanwhile, another
friend whom Gonzalez tried unsuccessfully to recruit for the July 9 robbery
told police the alleged killer "always acts like he's a thug, you know, a
mafia wannabe." But unfortunately, there may be a tragic element of truth to
this Wannabe's big game.